Visit Exchange Eases Israel-egypt Strains

July 22, 1992|The New York Times

CAIRO, Egypt -- Egyptian schoolchildren find Palestine, not Israel, on their maps in geography class. The flights to Tel Aviv, which require three hours of security checks, are not announced at the Cairo airport.

Egyptians who want to travel to Israel must spend months waiting for a separate passport and special government permission.

But the decision by President Hosni Mubarak to accept the invitation of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to visit Israel appears to have relaxed the strain that has characterized 13 years of distant relations. It signals not only a change in the Egyptian attitude to Israel, but the Arab attitude toward Egypt.

Egypt is the only Arab country to sign a peace treaty with Israel. But the 1979 agreement came with a heavy price.

President Anwar el-Sadat, who signed the accords and is the only Egyptian head of state to have visited Israel, in November 1977, was assassinated in 1981 by Islamic militants who opposed his rapprochement with Israel.

Egypt, long the center of the Arab world, has been ostracized by other Arab states for over a decade. The Arab League, based in Cairo, packed up and moved to Tunis. It did not return until two years ago.

Mubarak, who as vice president stood in the reviewing stands when Sadat died in a hail of gunfire, charted a correct but cool course with Israel. Of dozens of agreements in trade, culture and tourism signed between the Israelis and the Egyptians few have been put into effect, and many of those only nominally.

Israeli efforts to work jointly on variety of projects, including agricultural schemes, have usually fizzled and died.

Egyptian rhetoric, and especially the Egyptian media, often crossed the line into what Israeli officials said was anti-Semitism.

But while the Egyptian leader never showed any affection for Israel he refused to renege on the peace accords, for Egypt not only got back the Sinai desert after the Camp David accord, captured by the Israelis in 1967, but a promise of $2 billion in U.S. aid each year.

When Israel invaded Lebanon a year after the Sadat assassination, Mubarak withdrew the Egyptian ambassador to Israel. He was urged by many Egyptians to sever relations, but he eventually sent his envoy back.